


Bread and Babies

by KeirMoonrock



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Baking, F/M, Househusbandry, More popular than Jesus, Oh also he calls his son a “meat baby”, Set in 1976, Wow KeirMoonrock is actually writing something canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:02:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27180826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeirMoonrock/pseuds/KeirMoonrock
Summary: “That’s like what everyone else who has asked me that question over the last five years says. ‘But what else have you been doing?’ To which I say, ‘Are you kidding?’ Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job.”—John Lennon, 1980 InterviewPut simply, John makes some bread.
Relationships: John Lennon/Yoko Ono
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Bread and Babies

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something short and sweet for “everyone’s favorite” underexplored ship before I start my next project. Enjoy!

If nothing else on Earth was clear, not with lawyers or money or Paul’s new song that every radio station the world over wouldn’t stop playing, then there was this much—baking bread was not as simple of a task as it looked.

For all John cared, by one-thousand nine-hundred seventy-six in the year of our Loud, the “hobby” might as well have been a damn olympic sport, teams of housewives lined up in Montréal with muscles the size of a small African country, sweat dripping down their foreheads like rain from a gutter as they pushed their palms into the dough, smacking whoever dared question their authority over the head with their rolling pins.

They would be the apex of the art form, mixing flour, water, oil, yeast, sugar, and salt into a gold-medal worthy loaf, smiling for the cameramen as their children cheered them on from every corner of the globe, the citizens of their respective countries rejoicing in a renewed sort of hometown pride as the notes of the national anthem swelled from the television screen.

And if that were the case, and housewives really were olympic athletes—olympic  _ bakers, _ rather—then surely John would be the pudgy bastard on his sofa who ran a quarter of a mile once and called himself a track and field enthusiast.

With a seven-month old baby about to wake up any second, possibly crying, and three stingy little cats to keep him company (or, you know, scratch out his eyes while he crawled on the floor, probably on his way to inadvertently electrocute himself) John could almost see the headlines, printed in the tabloids on some  _ dreadfully _ slow news day:

**BEATLE DRIVEN TO SUICIDE BY AN AFTERNOON BAKING BREAD!**

**WIFE (THAT EVIL JAPANESE DRAGON LADY; YES SHE’S STILL ALIVE) SAYS SHE IS “DISAPPOINTED, BUT NOT SURPRISED.”**

**ONE DOWN, THREE TO GO!**  
  
Of course, tabloids lied and spat out whatever they pleased, if only to get some unassuming soul to notice them—not unlike that aforementioned seven month-old baby.

Who, as luck would have it, woke up with a gargled cry, a sort of scream that almost sounded, at least to John, like he was shouting, “Hey! Hey! Look at me!”

He sighed.

By seven months, the househusband had grown well-accustomed to the sound. 

Still, it didn’t seem fair to him that his meat baby should start crying only when his dough baby had been sealed away to proof for an hour—an hour he had been  _ intending _ to spend resting his arms from that god-awful process of kneading.

Instead, though, his arms would spend that hour holding onto Sean, his left elbow tucked snugly overtop the infant’s stomach as his right hand cupped the old plastic of the bottle.

And as if that wasn’t enough to worry about, the olympic failure, all the while trying to hold onto his meat baby, had to keep an eye on his dough baby, and an even closer eye on his fur babies, who were just amazed at the sight of a covered bowl on the kitchen table.

They jumped up onto the chairs, their heads tilted as soft mews rang out from their mouths, as if asking the clueless man with the baby in his arms what the incredibly fascinating and not at all mundane object was for.

It was a difficult thing to keep his eyes on the bread, his hands on the baby, and his voice on those mischievous kitties, but such was the fate the “world’s greatest musician” had resigned himself to. 

It had hit him long ago, really, that his life for the time being was to be little more than cooking for the wife, kid, and cats, cleaning up after said wife, kid, and cats, and grumbling about Gerald Ford in what little free time he had.

But to look in the mirror and see the same man that had conquered and unconquered the world, that same man who had, at one point, according to none other than those same tabloids, declared himself “more popular than Jesus” now spending his days listening to the radio and changing cat litter—it was a strange sort of sight, a contrast, really, like he was drawn out across a Pittsburgh nutjob’s canvas in blood-red paint, and behind him laid his old life, an indistinguishable blue haze he could no longer see.

These sorts of thoughts lingered through his mind as he turned on the radio and set Sean in his playpen, and continued to swim through the water in his brain as he turned on the oven (which, like a git, he had forgotten to do beforehand) and set the dough in the pans.

Was he proud of the choices he had made?

He supposed he was. Or at the very least, he was proud of his son.

But was the world proud of what he had done? What did they think?

Staring at shadows on the wall, he scoffed.

What should the world have anything to do with it? Those were the same bastards that had turned him into the new Guy Fawkes, tossing his face into the flames chanting, ‘Remember, remember, the fourth of March—newspaper, blasphemy, Lennon, and scotch,’

And now they were mad at him for having a family? For being a man that dared commit that awful sin of raising his own child?

There was no catching a break with those people, he resolved. They were the ambiguous ‘they’ that liked to worm their way into his life, so desperate to know what he was up to and then so quick to criticize what it was that he did.

And in John’s mind, ‘they’ were as good as whatever in God’s name was on the back of that oven—terrible to look at and better to ignore.

There were better things in the world, he reminded himself, christening his newborn and only slightly malformed children with butter. 

There were babies, cats, and freshly baked bread.

There was ABBA.

There were daytime quiz shows to watch while setting the table for lunch.

And there were wives eager to come home and see what in God’s name their husbands had been doing all morning, the corners of their mouths perking up as they saw the mad grin on their aforementioned husband’s faces, feeling on top of the world as they cut into the golden brown loaf and made a couple of ham sandwiches with mustard and swiss cheese and pickles on top.

Watching the bread disappear before his eyes, however, John couldn’t help feel a bit betrayed.

“Is this all there is?” he asked, stunned. “I spent all morning in the kitchen for this and now we’ve already worked through half of it?”

Yoko tilted her head.

“I suppose you’ll have to make some more.”

John squinted his eyes.

She was right, and he knew that.

But he still wanted his gold medal.


End file.
